Monday, May 01, 2017

Paying ATTENTION to Employee Engagement

How do you drive employee engagement and create a more cohesive, cooperative and creative team? Start by paying ATTENTION to what matters to them and their success. Attention is a powerful tool to increase morale, productivity and accountability. It starts, of course, with leadership. Here are five tips for truly paying more ATTENTION to your employees that will have everyone reaping the benefits of that attention.

Tip one: Survey your employees. “What Neen? Actually, ask them what they think?” Yes. Many of my media clients do this very successfully. They create an anonymous survey where employees are free to share ideas on things like focus and improvement without fear of repercussion or embarrassment. It’s a great tool to assess what’s going on with your team and learn ways that you can help them succeed, and your organization thrive.

Tip two: Eliminate unnecessary meetings. One of the fastest ways to increase productivity is to decrease meeting time. Take a good hard look at your “regularly scheduled programming” of business meetings and strike those that are just meetings for meetings sake. For all other meetings, figure out how you can accomplish more in less time by being succinct in topic, talking points and desired outcome. You are literally giving your staff gifts of time by cutting the extraneous meeting minutes. They’ll appreciate it, and in turn, have the time to focus on their tasks at hand.

Tip three: Stop communication after hours. Some of you are going to struggle with this one, I’m sure. We live in a 24/7 world, right? Smart phones in hand that can accomplish extraordinary feats of business brilliance. That’s wonderful. However, a life out of balance for too long creates stress, burnout and decreases productivity. Off hours, with the exception of rare emergencies, should be considered OFF hours. For most employees? When the BOSS emails in the evening, they feel compelled to reply. Whether they are at dinner with their family, at a social event or just re-charging, it feels like they are still on the job. Instead, create agreements with your team regarding off-hour time and encourage everyone to respect those agreements. One trick many of my clients use is to write their emails and notes when they are thinking of them, but they simply save them and set time aside each morning to deliver those messages so that their team members receive them during ON hours, rather than off.

Tip four: Create focus groups. I love this one. Can you create smaller groups within your larger organization that can brainstorm specific challenges, client needs or processes across departments? That can spark powerful innovation within your company as it gives people new voices to help create solutions and synergies. When they do, they feel better seen and heard, and that’s what EVERYONE needs to feel successful and valued.

Tip five: Create community groups. This is similar to tip four but where a focus group might be a short-term employee engagement opportunity, a community group, also called employee resource groups or affinity groups bring together people not just from across the organization, but thought leaders from the community as well. These groups meet regularly, often bringing in a speaker, to share ideas, solutions, network, problem solve, and have some fun with like-minded people.

There you go. Five ways to start paying ATTENTION to the things that can help you accelerate employee engagement which will lead to higher productivity, profitability and accountability. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

If you want to learn more about how to move your team to a higher, more engaged level with predictable, accelerated results, give me a call today to find out how I can help. G’day!